The garden was her mother's idea, although her engineer dad, Tim, happily went along. Laura Bauder is a graphic designer and longtime fan of several writers - Dr. Seuss, the pen name for children's book author Theodor Seuss Geisel; Maurice Sendak; and Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.
Bauder enjoys the intricate illustrations of these childhood classics, their quirkiness and outright silliness. But most of all she loves their openness, their joy around the idea that kids, and grown-ups, are free to "go off into a different world and find these little fantasy places."
Over Natalie's bed, Bauder painted a kite with a favorite Dr. Seuss quote: "I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
For the garden, Bauder consulted the brain cells of a couple of designers, who suggested creating "ruins" or a fairy forest. She toyed with the idea of a maze, knot garden, or labyrinth. But nothing rang the bell till she shared her Alice fascination with Matthew Sandy, a designer at Laurel Hill Gardens in Chestnut Hill.
"His eyes got big. He got it," Bauder says.
Sandy, a 2008 graduate of Philadelphia University and a member of its first class of landscape architecture majors, grew up in the woolly outdoors of Michigan's Upper Peninsula thinking he'd be a soccer star some day.
A high school drafting class turned him on to architecture, but in college, he found himself way more interested in what was outside a building than what was inside.
"With my love of plants and nature and appreciation and love that I started having for design, I realized landscape architecture was right for me," says Sandy, who worked at Laurel Hill through college and has now designed about a dozen gardens himself.
Safe to say, none were like Natalie's.
